


forever

by tostitos



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Friends, Friends to Lovers, Idiots in Love, Jealousy, Light Angst, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Minor Original Character(s), Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Soulmates, all those character tags but no one really says anything but johndo, alternative universe, johndo are the same age, this isn’t a traditional soulmate story but that’s what they are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28065540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tostitos/pseuds/tostitos
Summary: Johnny proposes to Doyoung when he’s seventeen.It doesn't mean anything...not in the moment at least, but Doyoung will look back on it years later and realize his quiet whisper of "I promise" was the exact moment they gave themselves to one another.
Relationships: Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Comments: 7
Kudos: 179





	forever

**Author's Note:**

> i have been procrastinating on all of my fest work as well as my socmed au but that is fine. i...maybe have sped through the end just to get it done (why? idk because it’s not like i have a deadline), but i’m satisfied with it so i hope you enjoy~

Johnny proposes to Doyoung when he’s seventeen.

It doesn't mean anything, a promise they make to each other at four in the morning as the end credits to Sunny with a Chance of Meatballs roll on Johnny’s desktop, Mark and Jay dead asleep on the sections of floor they've claimed for themselves. They're squeezed together on Johnny’s bed, sharing a single pillow and staring up at the ceiling. Doyoung is talking about university, about drifting apart as school work and extra-curricular activities flood in and trap them in currents that they'll never be able to get out of, resigned to watching each other become more and more distant, and Johnny rolls onto his side, cuts him off in the middle of his sleep-deprived rant to say:

"I'll fight anything for forever with you. Won't you do the same for me?"

And Doyoung looks over, dry lips parted from where he stopped mid speech, and can hardly find Johnny’s irises beneath how far his eyelids have drooped in exhaustion. "What?"

Johnny blinks and after he does so, he looks so much more awake, eyes wide open and, as soft as his gaze is, it still pierces something deep in Doyoung’s chest.

"You're talking as if there's nothing that'll keep our friendship in tact when we leave for university." He takes one of the hands resting on Doyoung’s stomach in his own, threads their fingers so determinedly, squeezes Doyoung's hand so delicately. "And I'm saying I'd never let that happen. Promise me you won't either."

It doesn't mean anything...not in the moment at least, but Doyoung will look back on it years later and realize his quiet whisper of "I promise" was the exact moment they gave themselves to one another, still way before he acknowledged even the slightest romantic affection for his best friend.

The realization that Doyoung might like Johnny comes when he’s nineteen. He's in his dorm room in Boston, having a virtual study session with Johnny who is still in Chicago or rather _he_ is studying and Johnny is playing The Weeknd softly in his room as he tears an overcooked frozen pizza apart with his hands to eat while complaining about a test he had that morning. They made it a habit to call at least once a week when Doyoung moved away and they've only missed a handful of weeks; they always schedule in advance, making sure to choose days they're least likely to have something pop up and ruin it.

"What the fuck are cumulative tests? Professors slave away for the sake of academics and think we need to, too." Johnny folds the crudely torn chunk of pizza in half and shoves it into his mouth. "Life, sir, thif if a fucking art hifstory claff for," he swallows, "non-majors, none of us care like that."

Doyoung wrinkles his nose as he struggles to answer a problem in his stats workbook, the math simply not mathing no matter what he tries. He hums, absentmindedly.

"Doyoung."

Doyoung twirls his pen between his fingers and then scratches out everything he just wrote in the notebook dedicated to this class, making a mental note to buy some new pencils. He expects Johnny to complain about how he's hardly listening, but instead an odd silence stretches long enough for Doyoung to feel it settling cold under his skin. He looks up at his laptop to see Johnny staring forward, no webcam good enough to help Doyoung discern the look in his eyes.

"What?" He asks, worry quickly filling his stomach with an uncomfortable warmth.

Johnny shakes his head. "Nothing. Nevermind.” There’s a knock at the door and Johnny spins around in his chair as it opens.

In walks a boy that Doyoung doesn't recognize, his hair dyed a strawberry blond, and Doyoung has a quick, mean thought about how no one has dyed their hair that color since the mid 2000s for a reason.

"Oh, Alex, um, what are you doing here?"

There's a hint of nervousness in Johnny's voice and Doyoung isn't quite sure where it's coming from until the newcomer, Alex, leans over Johnny's shoulder and presses a kiss to his cheek as he tosses a thin book on top of Johnny's desk.

"You left one of your notebooks in my room two days ago. I thought I'd bring it back," Alex says, voice only a note higher than Johnny's.

Doyoung feels that same cold from earlier return, except now it settles a little bit deeper in his bones like the first true day of winter with the warmth of summer but a distant memory.

Alex is a pretty face to contrast his voice, with rounded cheeks and a high bridged button nose, and Doyoung is struck with a sudden feeling of inadequacy as he looks at the two of them together.

"Who is this?"

Johnny glances out of the corner of his eye at the other boy in the room and licks his lips. "This is Doyoung, my...best friend." He taps his fingers along the surface of his desk. "Doie, this is my boyfriend, Alexander."

Alex laughs and waves at the camera. "I don't know why he called me Alexander, that's weird. Just Alex is fine," he says. "It's so nice to meet you, though! I've heard a lot about you."

It takes everything in Doyoung to not frown and plaster on a smile instead. "Same. He literally never stops talking about you," he lies, taking in the way Johnny refuses to look at the screen.

It hits then, striking Doyoung to the very center of his core and twisting his insides around the wound. The realization that he might like Johnny comes when he’s nineteen, but only after Doyoung takes an unexpected shot of heartbreak.

" _I'm sorry_ ", reads a couple messages in Doyoung's inbox later that night after he hangs up from their video call with the excuse to get dinner. He sees them as they come in, each with something a little different. One adds ' _I wanted to tell you_ ' and another pleads ' _Doie, don't ignore me_ '. A third one says ' _It was lonely without you_ ' and it almost makes Doyoung turn off his phone for the night entirely.

He doesn't like the sound of that at all, because it kind of makes it seem like Johnny going out with Alex is Doyoung’s fault. As if Johnny thinks he has to apologize for having a boyfriend on top of keeping the information from Doyoung. But he doesn't; there's nothing wrong with him dating...

No matter how slighted Doyoung feels that he is.

Their weekly calls become twice monthly calls become sporadic texts before they're twenty. It's entirely Doyoung’s fault and it has nothing to do with extracurriculars or schoolwork overwhelming him, but those are all the things he tells Johnny when asked.

He talks to his closest friend in Boston about it - - about missing his best friend, about wanting to forget these feelings so they can go back to normal - - and Taeyong suggests going out more, meeting new people and the like, so Doyoung takes it to the extreme and applies to study abroad.

Two weeks after his twentieth birthday, Doyoung is waiting to board a plane to Beijing. He bounces his leg with nerves as he sits by the gate, typing back reassurances to his parents that he has everything he needs and promising Taeyong that he'll stop by Boston when he comes home for the summer break during his year abroad.

He only had a few weeks in Chicago to prepare and in the one time he texted Johnny, Doyoung never told him he was home. He did tell him that he'd be abroad, but for some reason he's still surprised when, after he's found his seat on the right wing of the plane and is about to turn on airplane mode, a text from Johnny comes in saying ' _have a safe flight. call me when you get settled in?_ '

Doyoung sends back an okay and waits a few minutes for a reply that doesn't come.

In between jet lag and having to prepare for the spring semester starting in March, Doyoung forgets to call.

Johnny never calls to check in, so maybe he forgot too.

He’s twenty-two when Johnny admits to someone else for the first time that he's hung up on his childhood best friend. He could go to Mark or Jay, considering the four of them grew up together, but instead he vents to Ten, a presentation partner turned decent friend. He talks about how he's pretty sure he's had feelings for Doyoung since they were teens but was too stupid to know what he was feeling wasn't just an intense form of brotherhood — one of those _I'd die for you but no homo_ type of friendships. He talks about how Doyoung went to Boston for university and suddenly every time they had a video chat, it became harder and harder to not tell Doyoung how it felt like a part of him was missing because that would be dramatic no matter how true it was. He talks about dating Alexander, a member of his university's LGBTQ+ organization who asked him out after they got to know each other over the course of a few months.

He talks about how he couldn't tell Doyoung because, even though they weren't dating and Doyoung had no clue about his feelings, it still felt like he was cheating. He talks about how he couldn't even figure out what to feel when Doyoung announced that he was going abroad for a year, about how he cried when he found out from Mark afterward that Doyoung had come back to Chicago before he left for China because it was obvious that he had lost his place in Doyoung's life and he had no idea how to get it back.

He talks about how the first time his heart broke, he did it to himself, but the second time was when he heard from Jaehyun that Doyoung had started dating a guy he met in China named Kun.

Ten listens to everything, hums at the appropriate times, looks at Johnny with eyes somewhere between compassionate and full of pity, and by the time Johnny finishes venting he can't tell if he feels any better or not.

"Do you think you'll ever tell him?" Ten asks.

Johnny heaves a long sigh. His right leg bounces nervously as he considers the thought. He doesn't even know if Doyoung is still dating Kun long-distance, or if he's moved on to someone else, because he and Johnny haven't talked in months and in the rare times they do, it's simple small talk just to say they're keeping up with each other before the conversation dies in awkwardness.

The thought of confessing to Doyoung fills Johnny with a sort of terror he doesn't think he's ever experienced watching even the scariest of horror films. At the same time, he's reminded of how ugly it felt to watch the way Doyoung reacted to finding out about Alex they way he did three years ago. And he knows that was the start of it all, so maybe he owes Doyoung the full explanation and an apology.

Will he actually do it?

"I don't know," he says, sighing again.

It's the summer of the year Johnny turns twenty-five when they meet in Chicago again. Doyoung is as beautiful as he is handsome, giving Johnny's mother a hug as all of their families meet in a ballroom to celebrate Donghyun's wedding to the girl he's been dating since his last year of high school. He's wrapped in a tailored suit, every inch of his wide shoulders accentuated, with his hair carved off the center of his face and seeing him surrounded by the wedding decor makes Johnny's chest ache.

Johnny hasn't seen him in person in years, only through pictures on Instagram, and their communication hasn't gotten any better during that time. He never managed to ask Doyoung if they could talk, to clear the air between them that had become so polluted that even standing in the same room, Johnny still feels like he can't see the boy he once knew — still feels like he’s suffocating.

A hand lands softly on his back and he flinches, turning around to see Mrs. Kim behind him. He smiles gently at her. Even if Doyoung hasn't been around after deciding to stay in Boston to work, Johnny has seen the Kim matriarch quite a few times when he drops by his parent's house, along with Mark and Jaehyun's mothers.

"Hi, Mrs. Kim." He opens his arms for a hug and accepts a kiss on the cheek.

He used to call her mom, but time made that uncomfortable too.

She always laughs when he calls her by her married name. “Look at you,” she sighs proudly. “So handsome.”

“I know I’m supposed to say the bride is the most beautiful but while she’s not around to hear,” Johnny grins as he leans in to stage whisper, “it’s really you.”

“Always the sweet-talker.” She rolls her eyes as she slaps lightly at his arm. “You’ll probably be the next one we’ll be celebrating at this rate.”

Johnny looks over her head and finds Doyoung now with another man he doesn’t recognize. He chuckles, the sound a little empty. “I don’t think so, Mrs. Kim.”

Doyoung looks away from his companion then, locking eyes with Johnny as if he felt the stare poking at his skin. Frozen where he stands, Johnny can do nothing but continue the eye contact, no matter how much he wants to turn away.

“Enjoy the reception, dear,” Mrs. Kim says. She turns to follow his gaze and smiles. “You haven’t met Doyoung in a while, hm? Go and catch up. His friend is lovely too.”

That is not at all comforting to hear but Johnny hums and returns her smile as she takes her leave. He wonders if he should grab another flute of champagne but before he can make that decision, he sees Doyoung approaching alone.

“You clean up well,” Doyoung says. “You look good.”

“You’re not so bad either. Can’t even tell that Donghyun got his snot all over you when he was crying his eyes out after your speech.”

Doyoung laughs, a quiet airy sound that Johnny hasn’t heard in years. If Johnny wasn’t supposed to be happy and celebrating the marriage of one of his friends, the sheer joy of hearing Doyoung laugh again would probably bring him to tears much more hysterical than how Donghyun reacted to being able to finally call Rose his wife.

“Would...would you like a drink?”

Johnny glances behind Doyoung. “What about your...friend?”

“Taeyong? He doesn’t drink alcohol,” Doyoung explains. “And...I thought maybe we could talk? Just the two of us?”

Doyoung, albeit shy, was always more adventurous than Johnny when they were younger, and it’s no surprise that he’s the one to make the first step. If it was up to Johnny, he’d continue watching the other man from afar.

Maybe that’s what lead to all of this in the first place: Johnny’s fear of stressful conversations.

He nods. “I’d like that.”

They don’t fix it all when they’re twenty-five. They both apologize for being distant, for purposefully ignoring texts, for being stupid young adults. They don’t talk about the root of the problem, but it’s fine when they decide to start fresh.

Doyoung says he’s found a new job in Chicago, one he hopes doesn’t have power-tripping superiors who put their name on his work, and Johnny helps him move into his apartment. Johnny shows Doyoung the photography studio he set up after admitting corporate life would never be for him and takes candid pictures of Doyoung that he promises to delete but won’t.

“I missed you,” Doyoung says for the first time since they were nineteen.

They’re sitting in Doyoung’s living room in the aftermath of his housewarming party, Jaehyun (who coincidentally lives in the same apartment complex but two buildings down) taking up the bed in the spare room and Mark slouched over on the love seat, knocked out.

Johnny, sharing the couch with Doyoung, takes his eyes off the television. “We missed you too.” He starts to reach for his half-empty beer bottle on the floor, looking so nonchalant, and Doyoung feels so _so_ desperate.

“No, Johnny...” He lowers his eyes to his own hands when Johnny pauses mid-reach. “I _missed you_.”

It feels like a confession. In a way, it is. But in that moment, neither of them acknowledge it.

He glances up as Johnny sits up straight, his mouth bobbing as he searches for words. “I...I missed you, too, Doyoung. I’m so happy to have you back in my life.”

It might be the alcohol, although he’s never been the emotional type, but Doyoung wants to cry. He wants to hug Johnny — to kiss him — but mostly he really just wants to cry because he’s been in love with this man for six years and he doesn’t know how not to be.

In between the year they turn twenty-five and the year they turn twenty-six, they slowly remember what it’s like to be best friends again. Taeyong jokingly complains that he was only a temporary fill-in and now that Doyoung and Johnny live in the same town again, he’s being pushed to the side. Doyoung has done nothing of the sort, but he lets Taeyong tease him about how much he talks about Johnny. It’s hard not to when Johnny all but makes it his job to take Doyoung out to all of the new restaurants that opened up while he was away and when, nowadays, Johnny is often the first and last person he texts.

As stressful as it is not to reach out for Johnny’s hand as they’re walking back to his car after dinner or accidentally end a phone call with an ‘I love you’, Doyoung has never been happier.

When Johnny tells him to take off for the week of his birthday, Doyoung has to stop himself from doing it without question and waits until Johnny explains by sending him a screenshot of a pair of online tickets for a ski resort.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Doyoung says when he slides into Johnny’s car at the end of January after tossing his luggage for the week in the trunk. He says it again when they pull up to the resort on the other side of Illinois three hours later.

His parents were not the type of people to be interested in winter sports so they never came to a place like this and by the time Doyoung could make the decision to go out hours away from home without them, he had come to the firm belief that snowboarding or skiing was a one way ticket to the hospital with a fractured bone. Johnny has never mentioned learning either skills before, but there’s a snowboard strapped to the top of the car so apparently Doyoung has missed quite a few details about Johnny since they were late teens.

“Don’t worry, Doie,” Johnny starts with a laugh after they’ve checked into their room — a huge suite with a single king sized bed that makes one of Doyoung’s eyebrows rise and a jacuzzi tub that has the other one rising too, “I made a reservation for lessons.”

“Oh, so I can make a fool out of myself in front of a professional?”

“Yeah, of course!” Johnny looks up from his open suitcase with a grin. “That’s the fun of it.”

The lesson actually isn’t so bad, if only because Johnny is always first to reach him when he falls and cheers so loud when he does even the smallest thing right. That would be a little embarrassing if Johnny was anyone else, but Doyoung’s flushed cheeks are only from the cold biting where his windbreaker doesn’t reach (and affection).

He falls a little bit more in love the next night, after they’ve cooled down from another day’s rush (or mild terror, in Doyoung’s case) of boarding and are settling in. Doyoung comes out of the bathroom after a warm soak, already dressed in his sleepwear, to the lights dimmed and Johnny sitting at the table in their room.

Stupid, ugly party hat on his head, Johnny stands up and walks over to him, singing the birthday song as he comes.

“What is this?” Doyoung laughs, letting Johnny take his hand and lead him back to the table where there’s two mugs of hot chocolate and a cake littered in cheap, dollar store candles. “When did you get this?”

“Why would I reveal my secrets to you?” Johnny picks up the other party hat off the table and Doyoung is so in awe that he can’t even find it in him to complain as it’s pulled over his head.

When he leans over the table, he wishes that he’ll always be able to have moments with Johnny like this, that one day maybe they’ll be able to call something like this a date or a romantic getaway and not just a birthday vacation. When Johnny asks if he really wished for something and to tell him what, Doyoung dips a finger in the cream and swipes it over the other man’s nose with a loving smile.

“Why would I reveal my secrets to you?”

Eight days later, when he turns twenty-six, Johnny goes out with Mark, Jaehyun, and Ten for happy hour drinks and comes home to the lights on in his apartment. He wonders if he forgot to turn them off, which wouldn’t be the first time, but then he hears something and follows the sound to his kitchen.

Doyoung is standing behind the island, holding a corkscrew over an unopened bottle of wine, and he looks up when he notices Johnny in the doorway. He’s so beautiful when he smiles, wide enough for his eyes to shape near-crescents. “Welcome home.”

That simple phrase takes Johnny somewhere; it transports him to another life where he could come home to Doyoung everyday, could hear his voice unfiltered through a phone and see this smile everyday, could hold him and kiss him and watch how time struggles to age his timeless beauty. Johnny’s not sure if he wants this life or if he _needs_ it; all he knows is that Doyoung is here right now, laughing at the amount of surprise on Johnny’s face and apologizing for lying to get out of meeting them for drinks so he could make this birthday dinner as he uncorks the wine and pours it into glasses.

When he turns twenty-six, ten years of loving Doyoung makes Johnny slowly stride across the kitchen and risk it all as he cups Doyoung’s cheek and covers a stunned, parted mouth with his own.

When Johnny turns twenty-six, he feels incredibly stupid when he steps back from Doyoung, apology on the tip of his tongue, and finally sees the unbridled affection in Doyoung’s eyes.

Face a pale pink, Doyoung smiles shyly. “Do you know what I wished for on my birthday?”

Johnny, heart pounding and chest light, shakes his head.

Doyoung lifts onto his toes and kisses him again, short and sweet. “You,” he says. “I didn’t expect to get my wish granted so soon.”

Wrapping his arms around Doyoung, Johnny buried his nose in his hair and squeezes him tight. “I don’t know if it’s soon if I’ve been wishing for _you_ every year since you left for university.”

They apologize again when they’re twenty-six and this time they acknowledge why it all happened. They laugh about it, they mourn the time they could have had, they celebrate the chance they have now. Johnny holds hands with Doyoung the whole time, marvels how perfect it feels in his, like pieces of a ten-thousand piece puzzle coming together. He kisses the mountains of Doyoung’s knuckles, then climbs higher to kiss the clouds of his lips. He says _I love you_. And even though it is their first day of realizing their feelings for each other are requited, it doesn’t feel too early to say.

Doyoung is sitting at his brother’s house half a year before he turns twenty-eight, looking at how Donghyun and his wife have made the place a home over the years. There’s a key on his keychain for the door to Johnny’s apartment that he probably uses more than his own house key. He knows he has at least a few weeks worth of clothes at Johnny’s apartment from when he went to stay for a few days while the entire floor his apartment is on was fumigated for termites. He had stayed way longer than he needed to, had grown too comfortable too fast with waking up to soft kisses on his shoulders and falling sleep to the sound of Johnny’s exhaustion-roughened voice.

He realizes then, a year and a half into the relationship, that he gave his heart away to Johnny way before he thought he did. He remembers laying in Johnny’s childhood bed before leaving for university and promising to fight for forever. Those words didn’t feel so heavy back then, but maybe that was because a part of Doyoung always knew that it would be Johnny in the end.

“Who are you calling?” Donghyun asks when he gets back from the bathroom and sees Doyoung with his phone pressed to his ear.

Johnny answers with a fond, “Good afternoon, beautiful,” before Doyoung can say anything to his brother.

Doyoung smiles and tugs at a loose thread hanging from his ripped jeans. “Hi, baby. Are you busy tomorrow?”

“Not really.”

“Do you want to go look at rings tomorrow with me?”

Johnny is quiet on the line for a moment and then he chuckles. “For us? How could I not?”

And just like that, half a year before he turns twenty-eight, Doyoung is engaged. It’s simple, but it feels long overdue and it’s all they need. After all, Johnny asked for forever ten years before.

“I told you that you’ll be the next one.” Mrs. Kim brings Johnny into a hug and squeezes him so hard she _almost_ takes more of his breath away than when Doyoung joined him at the head of the aisle dressed in a navy suit opposite of Johnny’s equally non-traditional wine colored three-piece and whispered a soft _I love you_ before they walked down to the altar hand in hand.

He chuckles once she lets him breathe again. “You did, didn’t you?”

She’s been crying, and even if he didn’t hear her trying to hold back sobs during the ceremony, he can tell in the faint smear of her makeup. “A mother always knows,” she says.

He leaves his mother-in-law and searches the outdoor venue for his husband, finding Doyoung hugging Taeyong.

They’ve met before — properly — when Taeyong came to visit for a weekend from Boston and Doyoung introduced them after they had officially started dating.

Taeyong opens his arms for a hug when Johnny reaches them and grips him tight. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Johnny says. He turns to Doyoung and playfully puckers his lips for a kiss that Doyoung gives him with a light giggle. “I’m so glad we agreed on a small wedding. It seems like everyone on your half of the invite list is determined to break my ribs today.”

Doyoung shakes his head and slots their hands together. “Are you saying you’re not showing my family the same love they’re showing you?”

“I’m saying I think you forgot to tell me your family are descendants of The Hulk.”

Watching them, Taeyong smiles proudly. “You two are going to be happy together for a long time. I’m happy for you.”

Johnny glances down at Doyoung, the man he fell in love with over ten years ago, and he knows ‘a long time’ isn’t even close to being long enough.

It’s cheesy so he won’t say it out loud, but when he’s twenty-eight, Johnny kisses the love of his life and promises he’ll love him in the next one too.


End file.
